Efficient communication and collaboration among members of an organization is critical to the organization's success. Among organization members, face-to-face meetings have been the traditional manner of communicating, but, with the organizations becoming increasing geographically dispersed, these meetings often require travel on the part of attendees and, thus, are becoming increasingly cost prohibitive. The proliferation of computers and the advent of the Internet, and in particular, the maturing of the World Wide Web (“web”), has brought about a number of alternatives to the traditional face-to-face meeting.
Various scheduling applications, such as web conferencing, are available on the web and provide a less expensive alternative to the traditional face-to-face meeting. These scheduling applications are typically server applications that require network or web connectivity to access the provided services. For example, a user at a client computer needs to be online—i.e., there is an operable line of communication with the remote server, typically via a network—in order to access a scheduling application provided on a remote server. In the example of a web conferencing application, which provide synchronous or ‘live’ two-way online meetings and presentations, a user needs to be online to perform transactions on the remote web conferencing application, such as, schedule a web conference, invite attendees, change or cancel a scheduled web conference, participate in a scheduled web conference, etc.
Even though these scheduling applications provide increased efficiency and benefits, for example, by not requiring travel on the part of attendees, these scheduling applications still require users to be online to transact with the application. Because current networks and servers do not provide 100% reliability, there is no guarantee that users will always be online and able to transact with the remote server and the applications provided on the remote server. There may be instances where users transact with the remote application while offline—i.e., an operable line of communication with the remote server does not exist. Moreover, with the increasing use of wireless devices to access the scheduling applications, the ability for the scheduling applications to support offline transactions becomes even more desirable.